Slow progress
This month marks the anniversary of when I started lifting weights. I won’t say how long ago it was; it’s too embarrassing to admit, because if you looked at my body or my numbers, you’d guess I had at best a solid year of progress on me. When I started lifting, I had just finished half-marathon training. I was in grad school and didn’t have the money nor the knowledge of nutrition to maintain a proper diet. I’d always been very skinny, regardless of my diet, but when I stopped running and started lifting, I was around 40 pounds underweight. At 6’3”, I looked skeletal. The irony was that, though I was in good enough shape to run a half-marathon with a passable time, I was probably the unhealthiest I have ever been. The flu could have posed a serious threat to my life. Gotta hand it to fat activists on this one: thinness ≠ health.
Conventional wisdom online for those looking to start weightlifting is to get under a barbell as soon as possible and perform 75 squats a week, increasing the weight consistently until you fail your sets. This advice might be solid for some beginners, but for me, I didn’t have enough muscle mass—or just plain mass—to squat properly, even with an empty bar, and had zero training with any kind of lifting. It was humiliating, but I kept at it; half-marathon training had taught me all I needed to know about self-discipline. Progress was very slow and easily reversed: between a grad student diet and a very high basal metabolic rate, I couldn’t keep weight on me, despite drinking stomach-churning smoothies made out of 1250 calories/serving weight gain powders. It took me years to reach the starting line. Some days, it feels like I haven’t gotten very far beyond it, but it took a lot of effort to get where I am.
As you know, I have a deep fascination with the grindset trend among young men online. I have two theories—maybe not irreconcilable. The first is that the grindset is the new proof of masculinity for young men. Masculinity isn’t so much about sexual achievement anymore; “gets pussy” is increasingly used to describe an abstract quality in a man (syn. well adjusted) more so than articulate a pattern of behavior. Masculinity, rather, is configured around self-discipline: lifting, dieting, meditating, reading [self-help books], practicing stoicism, abstaining from porn, masturbation, and/or “hookup culture,” and so on. In both cases, masculinity is mimetic, about seeking the attention and validation of other men, but the latter certainly feels lonelier. Straight out of a Byung-Chul Han book.
The second theory is that the grindset is just a hedge against the slowness of gym progress. Among the behaviors we might associate with the grindset, weightlifting obviously reigns supreme, and everything else is a ballast (some, like nutrition, reasonably, others less so). The fact is that, without steroids, a history of sports, or insane genetics, progress is slow, and a decent program has you train 3–4 days a week for about an hour a session. That doesn’t feel like enough, especially if you want it badly. So you search out pseudo-activities and behaviors that will create an architecture around your goal to cope with the slowness. You build a temple around it.
When I make the mistake of posting on reddit—usually these sorts of social or cultural observations—someone inevitably dings me for basing my perspective too much on what I see weirdos on the internet doing, which is fair, but it hurts when someone on reddit says I’m too online, like we’re not both in the fucking gutter speculating baselessly about the stars to pass the time. So take it with a grain of salt. I’m just mumbling to myself in public.
Internet ragers
Still on my old shit, I haven’t been able to tear my gaze away from the midwitsphere. I’m trying to find a term that sits at the halfway point between ragebait and doomscroll that describes the impulse to seek out material that annoys you (I guess hate-read is as close as we get). It seems like the unacknowledged flip side of all the articles describing how the attention economy provokes and preys on your anger and emotions; sometimes, you aren’t the passive victim of the algorithm but clear your evening to read age gap discourse on /r/Catholicism because, frankly, Dostoevsky is so tedious and you’re so tired. I’m reminded of a LindyMan tweet: “A guy who hates woke culture so much he signs up to exclusively anti-woke newsletters and ends up reading about trans people for years.” Or people who hate Dimes Square so much that they keep up with all their activities via the lolcow board or the Crumpstack, or people who hate fat people so much they spend all day looking at photos of them and reading their content, etc. Seriously neurotic behavior.
Of course, this is an incredibly stupid way to live, but the internet permits fewer and fewer different “lifestyles” to play out on it.
After writing my article on the midwitsphere, I learned I was late to the game. Two podcasts already exist to perform endless takedowns of this scene (which one calls “gurus”), Decoding the Gurus and Surfing the Discourse. In a monster-of-the-week format, they replay podcasts from this sphere, break apart their arguments, and point out their rhetorical failures. They’re decent, maybe even satisfying at times, but not quite entertaining. More than that, I’m not sure what they see as the stakes of this “guru”-sphere or why it’s so important to “debunk” them, especially now that vaccine skepticism is largely irrelevant. At least the self-described communists who, in 2017, were ready to die on the hill that Jordan Peterson was a fascist for trying to impose a mythological understanding of reality (a claim that was equally “lolwut” as most of what Peterson says) tried to ascribe stakes to their loathing. Maybe these things have no stakes. Not to be vulgar, but I see no value in getting into a pissing contest with opponents who are more than happy just pissing into each other’s mouths. Or their own.
For my own part, I see the midwitsphere as the steady degradation of any sort of public intellectual culture and its replacement with cults of personality and clout chasers. It ensnares young men in the audience who can’t admit to themselves that they want to have slow, deeply penetrative gay sex with Andrew Huberman, which, of course, is a completely understandable desire, as well as the desire for uninterrupted eye contact with him as he massages their prostates with short, teasing strokes, sending them into primal male ecstasy. Despite my ambivalently elitist sympathies, I think that midwits and popularizers have a democratic role, but the way that these media ecosystems work is that they prioritize market values (e.g., engagement, audience building, content schedules) over intellectual values (e.g., contemplation, commitment, exploration).
But if you want a rule of thumb: if someone is selling you neuro-enhancing supplements, they are admitting to you that they have—and think you have, too—the sorts of brains that require active supplementation. Caveat emptor.
Self-crit corner
One fair critique of my post-academic life is that I still act like I have a research agenda, but my research agenda is “What’s the deal with Joe Rogan clout chasers?” To be fair, that’s more interesting than my academic research was, but even so, I’m trying to consciously uncouple from the midwitsphere and get back to my origins: literature.
I haven’t read much contemporary literature recently. I gave up on it earlier this year after my former dissertation advisor recommended Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. She and I normally have similar tastes, but I thought this novel read like a retelling of “The Gift of the Magi” but the gift is AIDS. The writing was nothing notable—just lucid and uninteresting MFA prose. I think I made it 10 percent through before I abandoned it. It’s so cliché to say that contemporary fiction is corporate, flat, and uninteresting, and the cliché is one that flatters the critic. (If you can’t see how flat it is, then you lack serious aesthetic judgment.) But there’s something to it: the prose is good but generic, the characters delineate their identities but are immemorable, and the story is fine but lacks humor and profundity. You don’t really enjoy it, but you also can’t hate it. Good-not-great. Mid.
In that sense, maybe I should be more grateful for how much I hate Dostoevsky. I reread The Brothers Karamazov for the first time in almost a decade, and I was reminded of how excruciating Dostoevsky’s endless dialogue can be. Most of the story unfolds as we stumble, along with Alyosha, from conversation to conversation. Contra Bakhtin, who sees in Dostoevsky’s dialogue a vast ecosystem of human character, I see in it the annoying hum of human noise, indistinct and irritating from the perspective of a god. The book ends with two monologues, stretching forty pages, that recap the entire novel we just read—twice!
And yet rereading The Brothers Karamazov, I came across so many passages and lines that I have regularly circulated through my mind over the nine years since I first read it—thoughts and formulations that have become parts of my psychic architecture. [Ivan] doesn’t despise anyone... he simply doesn’t believe anyone. And since he doesn’t believe them, he also, of course, despises them. I hate some of those insights for what they reveal about me without redeeming or correcting. If literature can’t change your life, then what’s the point of it, or are you just incompetent somehow—a midwit?
I started this blog, as the title would suggest, out of an interest in the failure of sincerity to reshape postmodern cynicism. Part of me still holds out hope in it. And yet I think Vonnegut’s most perspicacious observation was, There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.
Have a good week.
In your last recent essay on the midwitsphere, I began thinking about the "industry" of debunking midwits. In short, I've always enjoyed some debunkings, but felt like there just might be too many debunkings.
Anyway, as you mentioned the "debunking" podcasts, it got me thinking about how your speculations on the appeal of midwit stuff are more intersesting than straight debunkings.
I think that debunking is often funny but is often an attempt to sidestep and avoid considering how much sadness and alienation is around. If you put your energy into proving why something is stupid, you can forget, for a moment, that that thing is here to stay.
"The writing was nothing notable—just lucid and uninteresting MFA prose. I think I made it 10 percent through before I abandoned it. It’s so cliché to say that contemporary fiction is corporate, flat, and uninteresting, and the cliché is one that flatters the critic. (If you can’t see how flat it is, then you lack serious aesthetic judgment.) " better self applied, i think. also, casting your own perspective as that of a god? midwittery, indeed!